No matter how much power the few corrupt billionaires have or can amass against the people, they cannot kill the dream.
350 million people will stop them and make them pay for their betrayal.
The U.S. cannot continue to betray everything it claims to be without losing everything it has gained as benefits from representing those values.
350 million people love their country so much that they cannot sing “Home of the brave and land of the free” without feeling shame over how cowardly and submissive they have become by the machinations of monsters.
People like Curtis Yarvin will be vilified for decades, if not centuries, while the tech bros with overgrown egos will become cautionary tales for the next century to learn from. The Walton family should be experiencing concern, if not outright fear, for their future. The 50 billionaires who supported Trump’s presidency should be planning to escape to their bunkers. The Heritage Foundation president who threatened bloodshed should now be chowing down on some crow if he’s not too stupid to realize that he is about to reap the whirlwind for his arrogance.
The U.S. will either restructure itself to become more aligned with its professed values or it will destroy itself and destroy global stability in the process. The Find Out stage of the Fuck Around game the billionaires have played with the American people has only just begun.
If they don’t start issuing their mea culpas now, flaming Teslas will appear like quaint bonfires before Trump’s term is done.
The nation’s future lies in the hands of its people, while the rest of the world still holds out faith that the American spirit is not yet completely dead.
We are all hoping the scourge of this century will be overcome by far less bloodshed and destruction than the scourge of the last century.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Do you think by the time Trump’s second term is over, he will have successfully reduced identity politics to include only “Trump supporter” and “anti-American”?”
That’s exactly what his strategy has been to date. It is precisely that divisive strategy employed by conservatives everywhere he has leveraged into his position of power. This has been the consistent strategy of conservatives who claim the entire world is ugly, evil, and broken beyond repair while claiming they’re the only ones capable of fixing the messes they have made.
It’s a tiresome strategy that has worked wonders for them as they’ve instituted privatization programs throughout every democratic nation. They intentionally sabotage functioning institutes by defunding them to create problems that otherwise would not exist and then claim those institutes would be better served by the private sector.
People have been lapping this lie up since Ronald Reagan betrayed democracy by claiming the government was the problem. By demonizing the government, he created an entity the public would turn against as an enemy and scapegoat for all their problems. He successfully detached the notion of a government of the people, for the people, and by the people and converted it into an imaginary boogeyman that the people would willingly fight against rather than rise to their responsibility to change it in ways that more effectively represent their needs.
Disparagements like “nanny state” have often been used to characterize government as a paternalistic entity while attaching the opposing sentiments of historically destructive autocracies living within the cultural imaginations of people who have always fought for their right to self-determination. At the same time, the ownership class has endlessly justified their need for the government nipple to support the people by themselves as a proxy of wealth custodians with a paternalistic responsibility to care for the people by creating jobs for them.
In the minds of the people, blurring the distinction between a democracy and autocracy made it easy to turn the people against the only entity capable of protecting the integrity of a government of the people against the people. By turning the people against their only protection, he successfully made every citizen in every democracy around the world vulnerable to the only enemies of humanity that humanity has ever had — parasites who steal our value and hoard it in service to their egos.
DonOld Trump’s rhetoric, along with every CONservative political leader, makes a point of feigning solidarity with the working class while besmirching them in private. A recording of this dynamic was Romney’s downfall as he publicly pretended to have a working-class sensibility in the most awkward ways, making him give off uncanny valley vibes that made it difficult for people to buy his ruse.
George Bush Jr., however, was elected based on people’s perceptions that they could enjoy a casual conversation with him over a beer. Neither of these people understood or cared about the lives of everyday citizens. We have all been little more than disposable pawns in their games of power all along. The ownership class breeds this dehumanizing class distinction within every generation while disparaging anyone who does not share their misanthropic regard for humanity.
Trump hasn’t done anything different or unique from that playbook. He has merely capitalized on the inculcated belief that billionaires are job creators. Trump has leveraged the lie that his wealth is a product of pure effort and individual initiative. Trump has benefitted from the lie that anyone could have his wealth if they worked hard enough and were smart enough about how they spent their money.
He has taken the strategy of bamboozling the public over decades to its logical conclusion. He has benefitted from the illusion that an avocado toast diet has been responsible for irresponsible people suffering in poverty. It has been a strategy of mollifying the working class to such a degree that many have shown an eager willingness to wage war against their fellow citizens to defend the ownership class.
The ownership class has been so successful in cultivating the image of a blurred distinction between classes and making themselves appear as one of the little people that they’ve begun dropping any pretense of their disguise being a lie. They made themselves abundantly clear with the threat issued by the president of the Heritage Foundation when he declared Project 2025 would be a restructuring of the nation that would be bloodless only if the left capitulated.
The arrogance of the tech bros perpetuates a horror show of arrogance over the little people through a disgusting betrayal they have coined as a “dark enlightenment,” which hearkens back to biblical references and the devil’s temptations.
The most consistent characteristic of hubris, however, is its finite and fleeting moment of ascendancy because, like Icarus, the most arrogant humans who deign to fly too close to the sun fail to understand how their wax wings inevitably melt under the light of truth.
They will always fall to their doom.
This is the broad lesson of the history of social evolution.
Dynasties and monarchies are anachronisms because people invariably tire of the lies, the abuses, and of being played as fools while watching their dreams shattered one by one and the ownership class flying to the stars in their mechanical penises.
It is an embarrassment that Bezos remained so utterly oblivious to the profundity of that flight that he had to drag along a human symbol capable of interpreting an experience he could not appreciate. He struggled to acknowledge that that was only possible for him by the sacrifices of hundreds of thousands of people who contributed to his hoard.
The ownership class has been successfully whispering in the ears of their hordes of Stockholm Syndrome victims that their power is an inevitability, that it belongs to them by a divine right of kings as old as humanity. They ignore how their power rests on the shoulders of those who support them, and they do not have infinite patience for egotistical abuses.
Our stories are written by those who have historically stood against their power and have consistently transformed human society into something more approximating the justice history inexorably bends toward.
Trump will only have succeeded in pushing the stale ruse past its due date and causing it to smell so much like rancid fish that even the MAGAt army supporting him today will turn on him like rabid animals when they can no longer believe his lies.
By the end of his term, many of his MAGAt followers will have hit rock bottom. They will be ripe for vengeance against him and all the arrogant members of the ownership class who have been steadily waging a war against the little people for centuries. If all goes well, this will finally be the last of this primarily silent war because the little people will have learned that power should never be unlimited within anyone’s hands. Power must always be restrained. That’s the only way we can survive and meet our future.
By the end of Trump’s term, he will either be dead because his body will have finally given out, locked in prison (and primarily for his protection) or be in hiding from an enraged electorate that has finally figured out the truth about his betrayal against them and the nation he fraudulently claimed to be a patriot of.
The hordes of the people who outnumber the ownership class by orders of magnitude will either destroy the edifices of power while seeking retribution for their betrayal, or they will be satiated by an awakening among the ownership class that they either share their power or lose it altogether.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why haven’t we seen a more transparent Federal Government until 47?”
Nothing is transparent about the obfuscating nonsense a grifter is dumping onto the public consciousness.
Anyone with a lick of sense who watched Elon Musk speaking from the Oval Office as if he were an unelected and self-appointed president, enacting broad changes to public infrastructure as if his words were intended to create the best outcomes for the people would have been horrified by how thick his petard was spread.
It was like watching a Fox entertainment talking head barf up a stream of irrational gibberish because he figures a gish gallop argument of nonsense is enough to sway 350 million people… and if it isn’t, it’s enough to sway 70 million people who will run defence on his behalf so that he can continue to destroy the nation.
The most obvious example of “transparency by obfuscating petard” was hiring child hackers with criminal histories to tap into the private records of 350 million people instead of forensic accountants with a clear mandate to identify waste and fraud. Their agenda, goals, and processes should have been made public before beginning his process. Instead, it was rushed through to get as far as they could into violating the nation’s protections before being stopped by the checks and balances built into the system.
The alarms should have been ringing loudly that he has overlooked the most obvious target of waste and fraud in the military budget — which has never been audited.
Why do you think that is?
Right… it’s because they’re counting on military support to rein in the disruptive elements in society when they need to ramp up their pogroms to the next level of insanity and round up citizens who get deemed dissidents by the state.
The Freedom of Information Act has already guaranteed government transparency. You can bet any effort to obtain details on the justifications of fraud and waste supporting the decisions of what has been cut will never be revealed to the public. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to spot his motivations, considering that every target of his is a public institution designed expressly to protect the public interest, holding him accountable for his criminal behaviours.
Ask yourself this simple question:
If this administration cared about transparency, why is Trump the only president who has refused to make his taxes public?
Why did Trump lie about Project 2025 during his campaign while appointing a VP who called him Hitler? Why would the VP join someone they thought was Hitler, to begin with? Why is the VP not only a contributor to Project 2025 but also someone who publicly justifies lying to capture attention?
How does any of this constitute “transparency” in your worldview?
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why doesn’t Elon Musk want to save poor people in the world?”
He is saving the “poor people in the world.”
The disconnect is presuming he sees other people in the world as people rather than as objects placed on this Earth to cater to his poor existence.
Haven’t you noticed how much whining Trump does about life even though he was born on third base and has destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives throughout his life? After all that destruction, he still views himself as a victim.
Ironically, they’re both victims of failing to maintain contact with their essential humanity.
They will both go to their graves, completely frustrated and confused about why most people hate them.
Sure… they have devoted followers, but those are the easy and gullible idiots to manipulate. It’s not enough because they know the people who challenge them think poorly of them.
The jealousy is why Trump can still gripe about Obama a decade later.
Supporting a hated monster like Trump is the closest Musk will get to camaraderie. Meanwhile, both regard each other as useful idiots to their self-serving causes. Once the wheels fall off in their relationship — and it will because there isn’t enough room on the planet for two competing egos — eventually, one of them will step on the other’s toes hard enough to escalate into an open conflict — we’ll see embarrassing demonstrations that remind us of all the sandbox behaviours we experienced in elementary school.
Sadly, the more Xitter fails, the harder Musk will go after austerity for the little people, and that’s how he will deal with his “poor stature.” Musk is this century’s poster boy for why restraints on personal wealth and power are crucial to the stability of human civilization.
The MAGAts won’t see that, though, because they’re conditioned to desire submission to authorities they’ve been accustomed to worship. They will identify more with Musk’s struggles than their fellow citizens who suffer from Musk’s spitefulness.
Musk is saving the most essential “poor person” in the world, himself.
Why can a private citizen like Elon Musk address the nation from the Oval Office like he was elected president?
Government representatives support their donors because they owe them — plain and simple. For Elon Musk to support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign with a $270 million financial boost means he expected something in return. That something just happened to be the keys to the halls of power.
Made even worse by the Citizen’s United Ruling that money equals speech, the entire nation has been converted into a kleptocracy. Anyone with enough money can buy their representative who will institute laws favouring their wealth acquisition goals.
They will use fraudulent arguments like consolidation equals efficiency and lower consumer costs, but that’s just bunk.
The harsh reality is that the nation is no longer a democracy or a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.
The U.S. is currently being stripped for parts to be sold to the highest bidder, and the entire world will suffer from its dissolution.
It’s not the government that supports monopolies but the billionaires who buy government representatives who seek to hoard as much of the nation’s wealth as possible and support consolidation while claiming to be capitalists.
Meanwhile, the useful idiots in the crowd conveniently forget how one of the key components of capitalism is competition.
Monopolies not only kill competition, they kill innovation, and they gouge consumers.
For example, anyone who has had to purchase prescription glasses can attest to how badly Luxottica has screwed them over.
Monopolies are cancer for an economy and for society as a whole. Monopolies give rise to dynasties, which push us back to a time of being ruled by monarchs in a two-class society of rulers and serfs.
Democratic governments that have not been corrupted otherwise do not support monopolies and create legislation to break up monopolies.
Setting aside the failings of individuals who make bad decisions and cause problems for themselves, because there is always a tiny percentage of people who need more guidance to make better decisions, the vast majority of people suffering in poverty have done everything right with their lives and are still struggling.
A big part of the reason why that happens is that too many people waste their time wallowing in a misanthropic belief that poverty is due to the victims of it being responsible for creating their poverty and that if they just did something different with their lives, they, too, would be among the wealthy in society.
This myth that poverty is a self-imposed sentence is precisely what the thieves in our lives want the people to believe.
This myth that poverty is a self-imposed sentence helps people to believe they won’t become victims of poverty themselves.
This myth that poverty is a self-imposed sentence overlooks how our culture is geared entirely around impoverishing the majority in favour of the sociopaths who are willing to destroy lives to achieve personal material benefit.
This myth that poverty is a self-imposed sentence is why people become poor and broke because believing this nonsense allows poverty to exist in a post-scarcity world that could easily eradicate poverty overnight — if we could only address the rampant greed corroding the social contract to be the actual cause of poverty instead of shaming the victims suffering unnecessarily in a state of poverty that would not exist if economic justice existed.
There hasn’t been a time in my life where I have not been blamed for the clients who have stiffed me after praising me for doing work they benefited from.
Try to make sense of that.
It’s precisely what Donald Trump does when he calls the contractors that worked for him losers. He put thousands of people out of business throughout his life by not paying them for doing work on his behalf, and as far as he is concerned, it’s their fault.
This question embodies a corrupt attitude that pervades society, and it is this attitude that permits poverty to exist.
It’s the same attitude that admires how people can avoid paying taxes and envies that ability enough to want it for themselves.
This question enables the attitude of greed to characterize the rot infecting humanity and destroying human civilization because it teaches us to forget that we are all in this together.
Up to about half the people who are homeless in the U.S. are working full-time jobs.
There are over 25 times more vacant homes in the U.S. than there are homeless people.
Try to make sense of that… and then get pissed off about this:
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Could taxing Elon Musk and other people with massive fortunes 80% be the solution to paying down the national debt in the USA?”
The answer is quite simple and beyond evident to anyone with eyes and a mind that’s capable of connecting simple dots from a simple table of numbers:
Here are a few points to address regarding regurgitated soporifics routinely employed by the enablers in the crowd.
Taxing the billionaires won’t be enough money. — Well… DUHHH!!!! That’s not the point. The point is multifold, but let’s cover some leading characteristics. a. Force Multiplier and b. Speed of Money
A healthily functioning economy is highly contingent upon “the speed of money flowing” through the system — like arteries in a human body. The more plaque there is that obstructs the flow, the less healthy the system is and the more prone to systemic collapse it becomes. The low tax rates that we have now and that we had leading up to the Great Depression encourage hoarding and are a leading cause of numerous social issues guaranteed to result in a dramatic economic collapse — mainly as automation speeds up.
The more money the bottom end of the economy has, the more demand for goods and services, and the more businesses grow in a feedback loop. Even more beneficial to the economy is that when more people have more resources to invest in themselves and their futures, more innovation is introduced into a system that feeds on innovation to grow.
These two concepts alone, together, make up for what the useful idiots who defend the hoarding billionaires who lack imagination for humanity’s future beyond building space penises fail to account for. It is bloody disheartening that trickle-down stars can so thoroughly blind people and make them so addicted to the taste of billionaire orifices to understand how their misanthropic stupidity is the equivalent of suicidal ideation for humanity.
The graphic above screams the economic solution in our faces.
The lower the taxes =, the more unimaginative parasites and predators horde = the more sociopathically stupid they become =, and the more of a threat to our future as a species they become.
We create laws to mitigate the impact of excessive behaviours because we understand the destructive effects of unrestrained freedom on society. We know that if laws don’t exist to prohibit murder, many more murders would occur. The laws don’t end murder, but they function as a valve on society to mitigate and minimize the impact of widespread murder on society.
We create laws to restrain an entire host of issues resulting from the toxic extremes of human behaviour. Still, for some reason, the notion of building dynasties to rule humanity isn’t viewed as the threat that it is… even when the numbers add up to our extinction.
The main reason the billionaires should be taxed isn’t even economic, at least not quite directly the most important. The main reason they need to be restrained is that if they are not, they will destroy human civilization, and they don’t care because they have enough to build bunkers to ride out the apocalypse.
The people answering this question who are defending the atrocities of unrestrained wealth are as guilty of crimes against humanity as the MAGAts who are guilty of treason against the United States.
An astute argument was raised in response to this post that I’ve included here:
One point I would make is that taxing income and taxing wealth are two completely different things. Elon Musk may be worth $300 billion but that’s his wealth, not his income. If we start taxing wealth, be prepared to start paying taxes on the increased value of your house every time it appreciates in value. Politicians that tell you they would set a minimum of $100 million before taxing are telling half truths. They may set a limit initially but over time that can change. The original income tax was 0.5% of incomes over $1 million. How’s that working out for everyone ?
That argument sounds much like the fearmongering cynicism against raising the minimum wage — inflation will go up, or robots will replace jobs.
The reality is that property ownership is not the same thing as stock wealth, and there’s a fix for that — eliminate the corporate ownership of residential real estate.
Furthermore, the number of tax brackets that exist today is an unrealistic reflection of the historic levels of wealth disparity. For example, there are only seven tax brackets today. I checked to see how many existed during more realistic tax assessments. It was strange that learning how many tax brackets existed historically took more effort to identify than my bias believes it should.
This link below shows that in 1952, there were 28 tax brackets. Eliminating tax brackets benefits only the wealthiest in the land. The more tax brackets, the more granular the taxation rates and the less discriminatory tax rates are to the lower classes, and the more progressive taxes become — as they have always been intended to be. As it stands, the radical reduction of tax brackets has just been a means of waging a class war against the little people by allowing them to skip responsibilities that are inherently theirs while redistributing tax responsibility downward.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Is it possible that the ability of the Western-style capitalistic system to create great individual wealth will eventually lead to its own eventual destruction?”
I clearly remember my only extended holiday trip out of the country to visit Mexico in the late 1980s — around 1988. It was a fantastic month-long experience I had hoped I would do again within a few years while I was eager to explore the world. I had been living at that point, under the illusion that stability in my income would continue indefinitely while growing year by year as I applied my efforts diligently to what I was doing for employment.
At that point, I worked as an “Educational Counsellor” (according to HR) on the SAIT campus in Calgary, Alberta — a more familiar title for those with experience in post-secondary residence life would be “Residence Life Co-ordinator” — of which I learned many things. In this case, I realized job titles might be universal, but the roles vary dramatically from environment to environment. For the uninitiated, my function was essentially “Community Development,” I wore several hats to succeed in that role while being informed that I had developed — on a green field — the most advanced program in Alberta. I was pretty proud of my accomplishments and still have many good memories from that time.
In my early to mid-twenties, I believed I had developed a firm professional grounding that I could build a successful career for my future. That was less the case than I had hoped because I didn’t follow a defined career prescription and chose to carve out a path unique to my specific interests. There are many reasons for divergence from choosing the road more travelled, but they constitute a divergence from the opening sentence of this answer.
Rather than emulate Grandpa Simpson, I’ll say capitalism isn’t a formula or a universally applicable prescription anyone can follow and achieve great results if they stick to their map. The world I grew up in was filled with people who applied themselves throughout a forty-to-fifty-year stint in a role many hated but stuck with because they had mortgage payments and a family to feed. They could maintain their commitments for so long because the carrot of retirement at the end of their trek meant mortgage-free home ownership.
The first winds of change to that dynamic began to blow around the time I managed to see a small part of the world that was foreign to me. Ronald Reagan was president then, and his betrayals of the working class hadn’t been felt or predicted because the heyday of tax cuts left a lot of cash on the table for people to party it up. It wasn’t until the spend-like-a-drunken-sailor party began winding down that the hangover of austerity began kicking in — then came the dramatic downward slide of uncertain futures.
Lifetime jobs began to disappear as fast as the unions started disappearing.
At any rate, this was all academic to me at a time when I was excited to go on a month-long excursion to an exotic tropical locale that I had been familiar with from books but was eager to experience first-hand. I spent a couple of months in preparation for my trip by learning Spanish as best I could — which was relatively easy for me, having been raised in a Portuguese-speaking household. In several cases, it was more challenging for me to separate the two languages while I spoke. I had to think about my word choices to realize I may have used an unfamiliar Portuguese word when greeted with a quizzical expression.
On the other hand, it was like music to my ears when I heard a Spanish word identical to the Portuguese version of the concept. “Bastante” was such a word that made my heart jump in realization of how much both cultures have in common. The locals seemed to appreciate my efforts at communicating with them in their language and, at times, treated me like one of them. My travelling partner at the time received no such courtesy and was open about expressing her disdain toward this dynamic. For the record, I did try to help her learn the languages alongside me. However, she wasn’t very interested because she felt we would encounter enough English-speaking locals to manage without all that trouble.
Ironically, this was also my first experience with Americans abroad. I learned why many Americans affix Canadian maple leaves to their luggage when travelling abroad. I found it very easy to pick out an American from a crowd in Mexico. This isn’t to say that all were quite so brash and boorish in their entitlement, but every time I witnessed someone behaving in an overtly aggressive manner, it was always an American. To be clear, my point isn’t to trash Americans in general because I’ve known several who are decent people, but we can’t ignore the psychosis plaguing the nation at the moment without lying to ourselves about how much of it has existed for a long time. It had just never been so apparent before the afflicted began donning their colours in a political alignment of hatred as we have now.
At any rate, Mexico was and is a capitalist country, and that’s what this answer to the question intends to address. Of the many things I noted and was in awe of, such as the culture and witnessing with my popped open eyes, and the marvellous artworks of notables like Diego Rivera’s murals, was that the nature of its capitalist culture stood in stark contrast to what I had experienced in the much more subdued Canadian environment.
For example, my younger and naive self was quite shocked to see armed guards outside and inside every bank and shop that sold luxury goods like jewelry. This was in the “Zona Rosa” (Pink Zone) in Mexico City — a multi-block area expressly set up for tourist accommodations. Poverty was rampant, and street vendors, known as “ambulantes,” were everywhere outside the Zona Rosa in Mexico City that we travelled who set up tables at the train stations. (I remember being excited to see the Metro Station area we used as our starting point to our daily destinations a couple of years later in the 1990 movie Total Recall.) Walking around Mexico City in parts was like walking through a gigantic outdoor flea market where one could buy from an assortment of cheap electronics, music CDs, and crafts.
We travelled a lot by bus on excursions outside Mexico City while there for about one week. Each time we boarded a bus or when the bus stopped at locations along our route, three to five vendors wearing strapon trays filled with goods stepped on board to make their rounds and entice people to buy sticks of gum, candy, breath mints, and what have you of small goods they could carry.
(This is a screen grab from a video on a NYC subway that I found while searching for vendors at transit stations in Mexico. The hustle-culture trend from impoverished nations to the south has moved Northward. During my visit to Mexico, this was such a common event that no one responded with the shocked surprise and suspicion seen in this video. There would have been at least two or three other candy vendors on this subway if it had been the Mexico I experienced.)
This was the definition of a “hustle culture” before the term was coined.
Every poor person was a budding entrepreneur.
Mexico was dealing with serious political issues that were mainly responses to the widespread poverty that existed then. I remember hearing news of a Zapatista uprising nearby when we stayed in Oaxaca for a time before arriving at our final destination in Puerto Escondido, a beautiful and secluded beach resort.
At this beach, I experienced my most stark introduction to the world of capitalism through the lens of poverty.
I had been lazily falling asleep under a tree on the beach when I felt something graze the top of my head. I initially swatted away what I thought was an insect, but it continued to flicker on the top of my head. When I opened my eyes to see what was going on, I saw what must have been a barely eighteen-month-old child wearing only diapers and holding a wire coat hanger with handmade bracelets attached to it.
I was pretty confused by the scene as it presented itself to me, and then I saw a woman standing about ten metres behind him with a smile, nodding her head and pointing to the child. That was when I registered that this child was a street vendor in the making and his mother was using him as emotional leverage to make sales.
That’s the image I can’t get out of my mind when I think of capitalism.
Capitalism is a promise made to the desperate to survive that they can succeed if they’re willing to be creative and put in the effort to work at selling either product or themselves to get their material success.
Unfortunately, it’s a promise made by the Lucys of the world to the Charlie Browns of the world that they, too, can kick the football over the goalpost if they concentrate enough and put all their effort into making that magic kick to achieve their dreams.
The desperate to survive have no choice but to play the game while knowing after a while and after having the football yanked away at the last microsecond before each kick attempt that capitalism is a game played at their expense.
There have been too many times in my life when that magic kick was within my reach, and it was yanked away by some greedy sociopath who decided their desires outweighed the needs of the many. Their Lucy attitude was rationalized in the same terms every person who combines psychopathy with manipulation as their vocational strategy for material wealth does; collateral damage is justified as the cost of doing business. If people go bankrupt as a consequence of some decision to benefit personally, then it’s their fault for making a bad choice.
Because we have put no restraints on greed, capitalism will fail, not because capitalism is flawed but because humans are flawed in their social contract-betraying greed. Moreover, humans lack the desire to regulate greed, which has always resulted in the harshest lesson in life, as history has repeatedly informed us and that the Brian Thompsons of this world have been ignoring.
There are many more Luigis among us, and if the perceived solution for the billionaires is to beef up their security, they will also regret not taking the road less travelled… not because anyone wants that. Victims only ever want justice.
“Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution necessary.”
The disconnect is presuming he sees other people in the world as people rather than as objects placed on this Earth to cater to his poor existence.
Haven’t you noticed how much whining Trump does about life even though he was born on third base and has destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives throughout his life? After all that destruction, he still views himself as a victim.
Ironically, they’re both victims of failing to maintain contact with their essential humanity.
They will both go to their graves, completely frustrated and confused about why most people hate them.
Sure… they have devoted followers, but those are the easy and gullible idiots to manipulate. It’s not enough because they know the people who challenge them think poorly of them.
The jealousy is why Trump can still gripe about Obama a decade later.
Supporting a hated monster like Trump is the closest Musk will get to camaraderie. Meanwhile, both regard each other as useful idiots to their self-serving causes. Once the wheels fall off in their relationship — and it will because there isn’t enough room on the planet for two competing megalomaniac egos — eventually, one of them will step on the other’s toes hard enough to escalate into an open conflict — we’ll see embarrassing demonstrations that remind us of all the sandbox behaviours we experienced in elementary school.
Sadly, the more Xitter fails, the harder Musk will go after austerity for the little people, and that’s how he will deal with his “poor stature.” Musk is this century’s poster boy for why restraints on personal wealth and power are crucial to the stability of human civilization.
The MAGAts won’t see that, though, because they’re conditioned to desire submission to authorities they’ve been accustomed to worship. They will identify more with Musk’s struggles than their fellow citizens who suffer from Musk’s spitefulness.
Elon Musk is essentially living a life of revenge against whatever broke him in his childhood. His and Trump’s attitudes and behaviours are typical for bullies who remain convinced of their infinite entitlement to destroy others. They are self-righteous in their acts of destruction to levels equivalent to extreme religious zealotry.
Musk will sincerely believe he is a poor victim for being denied the $56 billion he demanded as compensation from Tesla. Self-serving bullies like won’t stop until someone stops them. Until then, Musk in his “DOGE” role will strip away lifelines from the little people to save himself a few dollars on taxes with righteous fervour. He will sincerely believe he’s doing the right thing for society by getting revenge on his victimization.
The attitude of being a poor victim is a common among billionaires who brazenly justify denying people their right to life to save themselves a few dollars in taxes. Meanwhile, all of their justifications for austerity for the little people is presented as if tax increases are and should be equal across the board. The wealthy have had their taxes cut by more than half in the last several decades which constitutes billions in savings for each billionaire. The little people have conversely gained pennies in tax cuts by contrast. Meanwhile, people like Musk, Thiel, and those support Trump consider themselves poor and unjustly victimized if their taxes were increased by a few percentage points.
The next time you hear someone use the expression, “victim mentality,” pay close attention to the person who accuses others of having such a mentality because that expression is projection for a sociopath. We’ve all had enough experience now to understand how the corrupt will make accusations that are confessions in disguise — deflections away from responsibility for their actions. People like Musk and Trump embody that mentality. Every choice they make is a form of revenge for their victimization while anyone who suffers as a consequence deserves their fates.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What is the least amount of authority governments can have in the market to allow functional free-market capitalism?”
Let’s begin answering this question by precisely identifying the role of government in market capitalism.
We, the people, through government, determine the rules by which the “game of capitalism is played.”
The government implements, administers, and referees those rules for “we, the people.”
The authority of government in this and all cases is determined precisely by the demands of “we, the people.”
Whatever authority a government has is authorized and endorsed by “we, the people.”
This is a basic explanation of how a democracy functions and from where its authority is derived.
There is no magic formula for determining how much or little authority a government has within any specific context, be it the marketplace or other social issues. Government authority is a dynamic thing which spans a spectrum of ideologies from right to left and top to bottom.
Generally speaking, “we, the people,” make demands of government, and the government responds to those demands.
Identifying who comprises “we, the people,” is where all our problems with government begin.
In the modern U.S.A., a society with arguably the most wealth and power on the planet has several stakeholders with varying degrees of power and influence on government operations — policies, procedures, laws, authority, and scope for implementing and enforcing their decisions.
This is no different than any other nation on the planet, except for how big the money and power pie is in the U.S.
The human condition is such that a contingent of us are so drawn to money and power that they deliberately influence government in ways that disempower and impoverish the many to secure money and power for themselves.
The largest pie attracts the largest contingent of the greediest among us. This is the cause of suffering for hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens today, which spills out onto the rest of the world because of its undue influence on global dynamics.
In many ways, the best thing for democracy worldwide is for the U.S. to lose most of its power and influence. If it becomes a sinking ship due to the recently elected corruption, the rats will abandon it for brighter prospects worldwide. Today, China is poised to become the greatest beneficiary of America’s power drain. It’s already benefiting from Russia’s hubris and overreach. China has been playing Putin in the same way that Putin has been playing Americans through Trump.
At any rate, to specifically answer this question, the least “amount of authority” the marketplace will have in its refereeing is already the “Lassez Faire” strategy the U.S. has been indulging in for decades. This is why the housing bubble and Great Recession occurred during the Bush Administration.
A complete lack of oversight means the predators in society have a heyday of mining suckers through fraudulent strategies to obtain their goodwill, support, and resources.
If you haven’t noticed yet, you might want to take a trip through Facebook and make note of all the advertisers.
There are at least ten scams for every legitimate advertisement because for a private, for-profit entity like Meta, generating revenue is a much higher priority than protecting their community. Ironically, they are serious about penalizing people for violating community standards.
Governments today have adopted a similar approach toward their administrative functions by outsourcing much of their responsibility to for-profit entities. The U.S. prison system is one such grotesque abomination of immorality practiced by the government through the authority it has been granted to administer national affairs under a for-profit mindset.
The fraudulent argument used to forward this human rights betrayal is an alleged saving to the people. The reality is that such a strategy represents a cost increase to the people with a dramatic reduction in the quality of service. This pattern of rapacious manipulation of government through propaganda fed to the people is most commonly associated with their (lack of) healthcare (health exploitation) system issues.
The goal, of course, in these cases is to appease the few with disproportionate power and influence in society to boost their annual incomes and quality of life at the expense of millions.
Their influence grants the government greater authority in areas that betray the people’s needs while strategically benefiting themselves.
In terms of authority in the marketplace, people are fed the lie that minimal authority is good for the market, while the reality is that it’s suitable only for the predators in the market.
To make matters worse, they succeed in their propaganda by delivering mindless solipsisms that dull critical thinking like a grifter convinces a desperate mark that they will receive a million dollars from a Nigerian prince by simply giving them a thousand dollars.
Like any sports event, a referee requires enough authority to enforce the game’s rules. If the field is big enough, additional referees are put on the field to ensure violations are spotted and dealt with effectively.
Without that oversight and the ability to respond to violations, the game is corrupted to such a degree that it’s no longer worth participating in any capacity.
Without the ability of the referee to exercise independent judgement, they end up favouring one team over all others to ensure they win every time.
In some ways, this is how the market has been corrupted by the notion that referees are unnecessary to ensure every player and every team has a fair shot of doing well in the game.
In some ways, the market has been rigged like a casino where the house always wins, and in this case, the house is the corporatocracy and the billionaires who own the house by proxy.
The less authority a government has independently from the stakeholders rigging the game in their favour, the less effective the market is for the economy. The restrictions on government oversight that are about to be stripped by the incompetence and malice characterizing the incoming administration will lead to widespread systemic collapse. This will be due to the predators among us experiencing a resurgence of freedom to victimize an entire population that will make the nation a new “Wild West of exploitation.”
By stripping consumer protections such as in food and environmental oversight systems, the outcomes are guaranteed to be fatal to an unpredictable number of mass casualties.
The next four years will be a supremely harsh lesson for those who buy into superficial soundbites because they are desperate to believe the Nigerian prince, who seems so concerned about their well-being, will sincerely deliver on their promise to drain the swamp rather than infest it with predators.
This bleeding heart bleeds for all the victims, be it left or right, liberal or conservative — but I will feel nothing but contempt for the self-serving MAGA addiction to hatred responsible for the ensuing chaos and destruction.
The people who fail to take heed of the nightmare ahead will be in for a lifetime of seriously bitter crows to chew on. I won’t be enjoying their humility, though, because I’ll be too busy grieving over the unnecessary casualties they will have imposed upon the nation.
thotbag 